l !S 1& 1 , \' I 84 compassing much of present-day Jor- dan. The pro-Jabotinsky hymn at the time went, "The Jordan has two banks: this one is ours, the other one, too." His vision, perhaps, is an anachronism and yet it is the vision that the current Prime Minister of Israel was raised on. Ben- zion looms above his son no less than Joseph Kennedy loomed above his clan, and his views are at the root of Bi- bi's sense of a menacing world. When you meet Benzion, he does not seem so forbidding: he has little white tufts of hair and weary, narrow eyes, the eyes of a Chinese scholar. On the day Bibi was sworn in as Prime Minister, at the Knesset, in 1996, Benzion sat in the audi- ence. Ari Shavit, of Ha'arefz, remem- bers seeing the old man and noticing that he betrayed no outward signs of pride or jo)T. "I was watching it on TV, and thought, My God, to be the son of this man, even if you become Prime Minister you can never satisfY him. This is really the key," Shavit said. "There is this person who pushes himself to the end, demanding the impossible, and even achieving it. Ifs like a constant Internal tyranny. You can never stop. There is no celebration." To say Benzion has no faith in a peace accord with the Palestinians or wIth any Arab nation is to state the ob- vious. Such treaties, to him, are the stuff of fools and naïfs. "Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts," Benzion told me, "carried out by anti- Semitic leaders and factions that man- aged to take over whole countries or re- gions in times of anarchy, civil war, or rebellion. In the areas that fell under their control, all Jewish communities were wiped out. Hitler differed from them primarily in having become the sole, undisputed ruler of his country and in controlling a much larger area, which al- lowed him to murder many more Jews." T o a considerable degree, Bibi Ne- tanyahu's internal struggle as Prime Minister is a struggle between an inher- ited ideology and the tug of political contingencies. His dilemma is always to what degree he can, or should, remain true to the ideals, the stubbornness, of his father. He may not always act on his father's imperatives, but he believes strongly in his father's rightness; both men share a keen sense of insular self- confidence, of being right when all oth- ers around them are innocent, bogus, mistaken. When I met with Bibi at his office, he fondly recalled to me how, in 1956, his father went to Ben-Gurion and told him that the Israelis, having just captured the Sinai, had to devise a strategy to keep it. Ben-Gurion had said that he would keep it for a thou- sand years. Why was Ben- zion worried about losing it? "Because the U.S. will force you to," Benzion told him. "Of course, he was right, un- fortunately/' Bibi said. "That was the first and last time an Israeli Prime Minister succumbed to an F American diktat." It is not hard to imagine this anecdote playing in the Prime Minister's head when American diplomats like Dennis Ross and Made- leine Albright sit with him in negotiations. Both the Israeli left and the White House would argue that Bibi has slowed down the peace process so much that the Palestinians and such Arab states as J or- dan and Egypt have lost hope. In recent weeks, Clinton Administration officials have urged Netanyahu to agree to with- draw from a fì..ùJ thirteen per cent of the West Bank in exchange for Palestinian guarantees on terrorism. Netanyahu has balked at that figure, though he has indi- cated a willingness to pull back from nine per cent of the disputed territory (perhaps even eleven per cent). The point, he insisted late last week, at talks in Washington with Ross and Albright, was that any accord must preserve what he called a "territorial buffer" against Palestinian terrorism. N etanyahu, to be sure, continued to face intense pressure at home: Palestinians demonstrated against al nakba-"the catastrophe"-of the founding of Israel; riots broke out, and several Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops. And it is far from certain that Netanyahu's right-wing Cabinet, espe- cially the influential Infrastructure Min- ister, Ariel Sharon, would agTee to a settle- ment resembling the American plan. Netanyahu's over-all argument is that the left's dream of a New Middle East, of peaceful relations and open markets in a region of Arab dictatorships, is fan- tas)T. "The real Middle East is not this lovely palette of lovely colors," he said. "There are some very dark streaks there. More than streaks-large swaths of fun- THE NEW YORKER, MAY 25, 1998 damentalism and dictatorial regimes. There is a battle on for the soul of thIs Islamic Arab civilization. I don't write them off I think we can influence it, but first of all not in a major way and, in any case, in a way different from the way the left thinks. They think that if we make more concessions we'll defuse the time bomb, the mechanism that keeps this going. But this is much bigger than the battle with Zionism. It's a battle with modernity." For the extreme right wing, however, Bibi has not always been firm enough with the Arabs. The Prime Minister's decision last year to cede authority over Hebron to the Palestinian Authority was, in their eyes, a betrayal of the 1996 campaign, and of Revisionist principles. Bibi's brother-in-law, a settler named Chagi Ben-Artzi, told me, "Bibi grew up Ín a family in which the principle of keeping the land, the entire land, in J ew- ish hands was a holy principle. . .. I've heard Bibi's father be very critical about the Hebron agreement. He said it is ab- solutely not justified. He didn't see any good reason to give Arafat more land before he carried out one single com- mitment included in the Oslo accords." Benzion denied that he had argued with his son about Hebron or Oslo in gen- eral; when Ben-Artzi made public his own opposition to his brother-in-law's policy; their relations soured. Reflecting on his son and Oslo, Ben- zion later said, "What I can gather from the deeds and the statements of the Prime Minister is that he is struggling to obtain, within the limits of the Oslo agreement, and through the implemen- tation of the commitments on the part of both sides, arrangements that are vital for the security of Israel and will minimize the outbreaks of large-scale terrorism and wars." Bibi, for his part, dismisses all talk of paternal influence as "psychobabble." His friends and colleagues who have known him for decades do not. Natan Sharansky, one of Netanyahu's current ministers and closest advisers, told me, "Look, there's no doubt that the father is crucial to Bibi, especially historically, in Jewish history and world history. In his day-to-day activities, it helps Bibi to somehow stay in focus. He gets caught up in the daily struggles, but he always has this view of history in mind." What will Bibi do, then, in the com-